grandeur of his style. He was taught by him to elevate his thoughts, and
to conceive his subjects with dignity. His genius, however, formed to
blaze and to shine, might, like fire in combustible matter, for ever have
lain dormant if it had not caught a spark by its contact with Michael
Angelo: and though it never burst out with that extraordinary heat and
vehemence, yet it must be acknowledged to be a more pure, regular, and
chaste flame. Though our judgment will upon the whole decide in favour
of Raffaelle: yet he never takes that firm hold and entire possession of
the mind in such a manner as to desire nothing else, and feel nothing
wanting. The effect of the capital works of Michael Angelo perfectly
correspond to what Bourchardon said he felt from reading Homer. His
whole frame appeared to himself to be enlarged, and all nature which
surrounded him diminished to atoms.

If we put those great artists in a light of comparison with each other,
Raffaelle had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and
imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael
Angelo has more of the poetical inspiration; his ideas are vast and
sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing
about them, nothing in the air of their actions or their attitudes, or
the style and cast of their very limbs or features, that puts one in mind
of their belonging, to our own species. Raffaelle's imagination is not
so elevated; his figures are not so much disjoined from our own
diminutive race of beings, though his ideas are chaste, noble, and of
great conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo's works have a
strong, peculiar, and marked character; they seem to proceed from his own
mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never needed,
or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help. Raffaelle's
materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own.
The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty,